Digital Harlem

I visited the Digital Harlem website and explored the map on the page. The map scored different legal records and black newspapers to document the lives of everyday African Americans living in New York. This mapping project is interesting because it doesn’t offer any biased opinion or interpretation of the data, because it only displays the location and type of event that occurred. It also follows certain people in the city, and maps out their common places and services that they used or worked at. One person that is highlighted in particular is Annie Dillard. Her upbringing, church attendance, and educational institutions are highlighted on the map.

The mapping project also supplements the map locations with African American history, as shown in the Annie Dillard page. The text describes the role of African American women in domestic service occupations, and sprinkles in experiences from Annie Dillard to further explain the history. By selecting different people on the map, we are able to see where they frequented in relation to Black Harlem in the different decades.

This map is definitely perspectival and subjective, as Turnball mentioned. While this map is definitely a representation of the real world through an interactive interface, and helps users better understand the history and events relative to one another, it is highly subjective, as each location is important to each person in a different way. The outlook of each event and location is viewed from the perspective of African Americans in Harlem, which these researchers took and provided supplemental information about the history. These experiences are all laid out on the map, and aren’t biased in one direction and are transparent with the history.

This map reflects the views of the researchers’ thoughts of important scenes and topics in Harlem. It assumes that the boundaries of Harlem were confined to the map’s boundaries during each time period listed on the map. However, the map is a good visualization of important and historical locations in Harlem. An alternate map could include personal stories or journal entries from the people mentioned in the categories, as that information could better supplement the histories that the map tried to explain.